Indonesia: SMS Features and Restrictions

Starting 31st October 2017, Indonesian government requires SIM card owners to register their number with a national ID.

This registration is a government effort to prevent misuse of customer numbers, especially prepaid subscribers as part of the Government’s commitment in providing protection to consumers and for the interests of national single identity.

Delivery ratios towards Indonesia might be lower than expected until all SIM card owners have completed the registration. This will not be a route failure but a consequence of subscribers not registering their details.

Sender ID:

Sender IDs might be replaced by an alphanumeric SenderID to ensure delivery.

Pre-registered Sender ID:

If you require assistance with setting your own pre-registered customised sender ID up Nexmo can help to pre-register for volumes exceeding 100k messages per month.Please contact support@nexmo.com for more information.

Virtual Numbers

The senderID for outbound SMS, using a local LVN as senderID, will be changed to a random number to ensure delivery. Therefore the recipient would need to generate a new inbound SMS rather than replying directly.

Please note that only P2P traffic is allowed to be sent using the virtual numbers.

Content:

Sexual Content:

Sexual content is not allowed.

Racist Content:

Racist content is not allowed.

Gambling Content:

Gambling content is not allowed.

Religious Content:

Religious content that insults another religion is not allowed.

Keyword filtering:

Telkomsel (51010) / Axis (51008) /PT XL Axiata Tbk (51011):

Transactional traffic and messages containing certain keywords such as "Verify" / "PIN" / "Code" may be filtered. If you intend to send this type of traffic, please contact us at support@nexmo.com with information about your use-case and message template.Nexmo has access to transactional routes able to bypass this restriction, and provide a pre-registered sender ID.The SenderID needs to be in a Alphanumeric format (eg. abc123) of up to 11 characters max.

Unicode:

Unicode encoding is officially not supported by any of the networks in Indonesia, and we, therefore, suggest using GSM7 encoding. Extended characters are often problematic.

Concatenated messages:

Concatenated messages are not guaranteed to be delivered to all networks. We recommend that the messages be limited to one singular message, or break the messages into parts to ensure the best delivery.

Other features/restrictions of note:

Delivery Receipts:

Delivery receipts are extremely unreliable across all networks in this country, some are missing completely, and therefore drawing conclusions based on DLR statuses will be inaccurate.

Ported numbers:

We do have reach to ported numbers on all networks.

PT Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (51000):

Please aware that SMS are not supported towards this network.

Update - 26th February 2018

Starting 31st October, Indonesian government requires SIM card owners to register their number with a national ID. This requirement is immediate for new numbers, and will have a gradual impact on active subscribers until 28th February 2018, causing messages to fail towards unregistered numbers.

Partial SIM Card blocking (unable to send and make outgoing call/sms) will begin from 1st March 2018, till 31st March 2018.

Full SIM Card blocking (unable to send/receive any call/sms/internet) will begin from 1st April 2018, till 15th April 2018.

SIM Cards will be expired / retired from 16th April 2018

This registration is a government effort to prevent misuse of customer numbers, especially prepaid subscribers as the Government’s commitment in providing protection to consumers and for the interests of national single identity.

Delivery ratios towards Indonesia might be lower than expected until all SIMs are registered. This will not be a route failure but a consequence of subscribers not registering their details with their SIM provider.